Three years after she went vegan, her financial circumstances shifted, too. She found herself able to afford the luxury of experimenting with recreational drugs. So she decided to try some things she’d never put in her body before, including cocaine. It seemed permissible to her. How, she wondered, could animals possibly be harmed by growing marijuana, psilocybin mushrooms, or coca—the plant from which cocaine is derived—or by synthesizing MDMA, 2CB, or LSD? They couldn’t be, she figured. Isn’t cocaine technically vegan?“I probably rationalize things by telling myself that cocaine in and of itself doesn't have to harm animals, people, or the environment, especially if it was made legally in a lab,” she says to me. “If it were legal to make, it could be done without all the negative things we all know surround it, right? In some fantasy world, we could grow organic, sustainable coca plants and appropriately control and dispose of all the harsh chemicals required to extract the active chemical. We could regulate the sale, and get rid of all the violence that surrounds it.”READ MORE: Gordon Ramsay Says the Restaurant Industry Has a Cocaine Problem (Duh)
“I don't know—are sulfuric acid, potassium permanganate, sodium carbonate, kerosene, acetone, and hydrochloric acid considered vegan?” Kendra McSweeney asks me. “Besides coca leaf, these are the chemicals required to produce cocaine.”McSweeney is a professor at Ohio State University's Department of Geography whose work, which involved embedding in Honduras’ La Mosquitia region, has focused on the widespread deforestation wrought upon pockets of Central America by cocaine farming and trafficking. “Whether or not you care would presumably depend on whether or not you're primarily an ethical vegan who cares about all living things, or an environmental vegan who feels that eating otherwise harms the planet,” she explains to me. “If the latter, then nope, cocaine's not part of a truly vegan diet. If the former, maybe it's justifiable to you.” Cocaine is extracted directly from the coca plant, its leaves plucked, ground, pulverized, and mixed vigorously with a base that’s usually lime salt and kerosene. The resultant solution is eventually filtered and then dried into a paste, and the excess product gets tossed into surrounding bodies of water."If it were legal to make, it could be done without all the negative things we all know surround it, right? In some fantasy world, we could grow organic, sustainable coca plants and appropriately control and dispose of all the harsh chemicals required to extract the active chemical."
Still, when presented with these arguments, most of the vegan cocaine users I speak to are relatively nonplussed, including those who imagine themselves to be the most principled when it comes to the rest of their diet and lifestyle.
“Are vegans held to a higher standard than everyone else?” she asks me. “Is that because vegans tend to be so judgemental of how others eat that we need to judge them back with more ferocity, in all the different choices they make?”Arnold, a 20-year-old sophomore at George Washington University, has been vegan for a year and a half. He credits his diet with transforming his physique—he’s shed nearly 100 pounds, dropping from 225 to 140, and reduced his BMI from 37 to 23. He’s grown so fierce in his devotion to veganism that he’s recently begun toying with vegan activism.He’s also done his fair share of cocaine in his life, using it recreationally since his junior year of high school. He doesn’t consider it vegan, per se, but he also doesn’t see any moral or ethical quandaries with cocaine consumption. Rather, he likens the use of cocaine to encountering other “non-vegan stuff,” such as cellphones full of conflict minerals that are constructed by child laborers in China—infinite chains of relatively unavoidable ethical discrepancies that he doesn’t see as contradicting his love of animals.“That some consumers might convince themselves their choices are somehow defensible in light of the absence of animal content in cocaine is a travesty of environmental ethics.”
He says he’s unswayed by arguments about environmental disturbance, too. “Veganism is about animals, after all,” he reminds me. “I do other shit like drive my car around at ten miles per gallon, or smoke lots of weed. There’s always going to be some unethical effects of what you’re doing. Not eating 200 or more animals per year is good enough for me, and is way more beneficial to animals and the environment than abstaining from a half gram of coke.”The pretext that ignorance is bliss, that turning a blind eye to the knots and wrinkles in supply chains can absolve consumers of culpability, is a refrain I hear from other vegans who don’t see their cocaine use as evidence of hypocrisy.“It’s kind of like how some alcohol isn’t vegan because there are animal bladders involved in making it somehow,” another woman, Mackenzie, told me. “Like, I don’t want to eat an animal bladder, but if one touched my wine, I guess I can live with that.”Or take Aaron, a 24-year-old Queens man: “If someone told me my favorite liquor contained something non-vegan, would I quit drinking it? No. My logic is probably flawed, but I’m not about to stop fucking with things that I enjoy.”READ MORE: Drug Traffickers Love Smuggling Cocaine in Pumpkins
It’s also coupled with a vague sense of powerlessness, and, thus, futility in trying to resist that at all: “Well, if I stop doing coke, all that shit will still be happening, so my small contribution of quitting won’t change a thing,” another person, Renee, wrote me. John Joseph McGowan finds that particular rationale to be, plainly, bullshit. He rose to fame three decades ago as the lead singer of the legendary New York hardcore band Cro-Mags, and he’s become one of the more outspoken advocates of plant-based diets as pathways to sobriety, including authoring a book called Meat Is for Pussies.McGowan, 55, first got into raw foods in 1981 when he began working at a health food store. He turned to cocaine in 1987, a rough patch for Cro-Mags and a period when he began associating with people who got high, and, in particular, liked to freebase."Not eating 200 or more animals per year is good enough for me, and is way more beneficial to animals and the environment than abstaining from a half gram of coke."
“I’ll never forget it,” he says of his initial experience with cocaine. “The first thing I said was, ‘Now I know why Bruce Lee did coke.’”On the first night he did cocaine, he’d slept at an acquaintance’s place in Florida; that acquaintance had stolen cocaine from a group of men he barely knew. The next morning, the men from whom the cocaine had been stolen rolled up with two AR-15s and emptied two magazines into the room where he was sleeping. Bullets missed McGowan's head by inches.